Short Story Wednesday

The Choice

Dear Readers,

As you know, if you visit here on Wednesday, I post fiction—serialized or complete—depending on what writing I’ve accomplished during the week. Today’s short story, The Choice, takes place during summer in a small rural town where we step inside fourteen-year-old Lannie’s head and share her observations about the people in her life.

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The Choice

Part 1

I’d never thought about Glenna being ugly, but that’s what my mother said Glenna was one day while she and Mary Phillips and Jane MacCauley were playing canasta on our front porch. My mother was an authority on ugly women. She worked at the Cut and Curl Hair Salon and turned them out one after the other Tuesday through Saturday.

Herb, on the other hand, my mother said, was a real nice-looking man. Clean and presentable even if he did work on greasy cars in the Ace Garage every day. How Glenna ever snagged him was beyond her.

“They never adopted, did they?” That was Mary Phillips. She always had a way of asking personal questions that stirred things up.

“Glenna adopt? What in the world would she do with a child?” My mom.

“Plant it and watch it grow would be my guess,” Jane (Sour Grapes) MacCauley said, laughing in that crow-like way she had that set every ear to ringing. She couldn’t grow ivy but, Glenna, no matter what old stick she’d push in the ground, it’d sprout and bloom.

Those ladies all thought Mrs. MacCauley’s joke was funny and had themselves a good chuckle. I left by the back door for Glenna’s.

Mary Phillips was wrong, you see. Glenna adopted me. Mom had her canasta parties and a job, so she was always busy in the summer when I had the most time to do nothing. I’d traipse on down to Glenna’s, dig in the dirt, drink lemonade, and eat box cookies under her apple tree while she fertilized and cultivated and yanked weeds from between the Black-eyed Susans. My first reader, as I recall, was the Burpee’s seed catalog, and I could spell Delphinium before I ever seen one. I’d growed up there, and, even if I was only fifteen come July, the best summer days still happened in Glenna’s garden.

Morguefile

When I come up the path, she was kneeling on a patch of ground she’d turned over fresh that morning. It was dark, still damp, and sharp-smelling of cow dung. She waved a welcome and bent to tamp a new plant into place. The back of her hair had been chopped an inch or so since I saw her yesterday.

“You went and cut your hair again.”

“Yes. How’s it look, Lannie? Even?”

“Not hardly, Glenna.”

“You can fix it later. Put the rest of these petunias in here and I’ll go get us a cold drink.”

Glenna was not a customer at the Cut and Curl. She’d hold up a mirror to the back and cut her hair with scissors she said had been her mother-in-law’s—the best seamstress in town. Glenna didn’t sew. She didn’t cut her hair good neither. Sometimes it would come out a lot longer on one side than the other, so she’d tuck it behind her ears which, the canasta ladies agreed, were big enough to hold back a horse's tail. I’d come over and even her up so I didn’t have to hear them sniping about her. If I couldn’t make it, Glenna didn’t mind. She’d scrunch a big-brimmed hat on her head and parade down the street like she’d just won first prize for something.

“About the only first prize Glenna’s ever gonna win is for sloppy housekeeping.” My mom and her friends always had something to say about Glenna, and none of it good.

Maybe it was Glenna’s fault. She never socialized right. Oh, she’d go to the church get-togethers, but then she’d take along her favorite box cookies. Those cookies were kind of disgraceful, I guess. Mom rolled her eyes to heaven, and Mary Phillips clicked her tongue like a nervous chicken. Glenna’d just stand around, quiet and look over the ladies' curly heads, a tall Delphinium moving slow in the wind, high above the snippy talk.

Part 2, Next Wednesday

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